Vantage point: Making space for emotions

Management schools don’t recommend taking emotions seriously. But recently a class was held for students of Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay, to help them understand the place of emotions in their management careers.

The class was held by R Gopalakrishnan, director, Tata Sons, and had both students and their professors in attendance. Gopalakrishnan delved into his 45 years of professional management career, to make the students aware of what is not taught at business schools.

Here are some of the nuggets of pragmatic wisdom:

* Finding a purpose in life: The process of discovery should be enjoyed. It could be divided into zones where a manager both enjoys doing the work and feels competent or worthy during it.

* Context in a manager’s life: The time spent studying case studies should not make us forget the larger context. “ A manager will never know all the facts, but she has to work with as many facts as possible and knowing the context goes a long way,” says Gopalakrishnan.

* Use of emotions: Emotions help us to store our experiences in their context for future reference, he reminds. Without such filing away, managers will find it hard to deal with the non- rational, emergent developments that might not have been provisioned for.

* Personal learning time: You have to create time to spend on learning, be it reading up or attending conferences. Remarking on how a much smaller outfit in the UK, Kingsford Coal, learnt more about safety from a Dupont team’s criticism, even though it was the latter which was visiting them on a learning trip.

* Strategy not the end- all: Rather than be infatuated with strategy, one should ensure the discipline to execute it as well. Gopalakrishnan gives the example of TAS officers at Tata who used to be talented but held non- executive roles until he shook things up by sending them on operational tasks.

* Listen to the ground: Listen to echoes reverberating off the lower echelons in the organisation. Citing the 1997 disaster at the World Pigeon Association, he explained how pigeons lost their bearing in the trans- Atlantic race due to Concordes interfering with sonic boom from the shores. “ There creeps in organisational noise during a change. But managers need to keep their ears trained. “

* Handling failure: There are five stages organisations and individuals usually go through to surface from failure. Denial of a threat looming ahead, anger at being at the receiving end, negotiating half- heartedly to mitigate damage, depression and finally acceptance and action. “ Companies can lose nine to 12 months between denial and acceptance. The shorter we make the journey the better,” Gopalakrishnan says.

* Boss as a customer: People join companies but leave bosses. The employees can get by better by engaging the senior as a customer — delivering reliably, maintaining affability, and managing perceptions.